It is that, as you say, but also more than only that.
Will to truth is one kind of will to power, one kind among many possible kinds.
Will to power is very much an ontological idea, or more precisely an onto-epsitemic one. It is not a “moral” idea in the sense that N understood morality.
Telos does not = morality, for N or otherwise.
Yes, except that even Nietzsche via will to power and, more essentially through eternal return, caves to a semblance of telos, because he discovers it is impossible to do away with entirely. N is reacting against CHRISTIAN telos, not against the notion of telos itself. Remember, secular modernity and science are very much Christian, to N.
That is a mistaken and simplified reading of Nietzsche.
Teleological means “with/of/for purpose”. Goal-directed. It does not need to mean also “moral” or “metaphysical”.
The “goal” of will to power is to will power, to will itself. It is the “self-propelled wheel” as N writes in TSZ, the basis of consciousness and all gradations, from lower to higher forms, of consciousness (“will”).
Nyet. There is only one will to power, and N is explicit that truth is not a useful goal, by and large. There is no truth in the sense that those he was reacting to thought, hence the will to truth is a phantom. Nietzsche wasn’t writing in a vacuum, and a little consideration of the history of philosophy, of which N was keenly aware, goes a long way in understanding just what he was talking about.
I used the scare quotes for a reason. Again, you have to consider that N was in a dialog with Plato and Descartes and Kant. He was a critic and it was they who he was often criticising. He writes philosophy about philosophy. I wonder how much Plato and Kant you have read. If it’s not a lot, you will miss a lot of what N says.
No shit.
I cannot fathom how you reach this conclusion. But I have already commented upon this.
It’s simplified, yes. Evidently, I have not been able to simplify it enough.
Again, no shit.
You seem to lack the sense of irony with which N makes a similar claim. I might have guessed that you’d chose the most testosterone-laden version of his thinking, which is also among the most ironic.
“There is no truth” is definitely something that Nietzsche was not saying.
I could throw the same accusation at you, and it would be equally mindless and lazy.
You could also stop simplifying everything and then throwing around half-veiled insults. But then you might attain something other than a grumpy, washed up old fuck with an ax to grind.
No shit.
Not to me.
Science and secular modernity are the children of Christ. You might want to read more carefully. (How does the shitty insulting feel?)
Yep, I’m gonna stop here. We’re done. You can go fuck yourself. Good day.
The will to power is in part conscious, namely for the part that a being is conscious of itself. Consciousness is nothing but will to power, and this will produces, when conscious, a goal. We can not be consciously willing to power (existing) without having a idea of a specific state of power, be this idea a rudimentary object of desire or the apex of an explicitly construed strategy.
Any goal that you may have in your mind is an instance of the the will to power as consciousness.
That’s why nihilism has the subject desire unconsciousness. It doesn’t want to have goals, because it realizes the folly of all particular goals. Nietzsche’s remedy here is to accept goals as means of the will to be conscious, and set them accordingly. The goal itself doesn’t matter, what matters is in how well it allows the will to experience itself consciously.
Nietzsche wasn’t impressed with consciousness as a means to truth. In his paradigm it is only a contingency of the will to power, and I imagine he’d interpret it as valuable only in as far as it could be honest to itself about its nature. And that simply means that it would be conscious of itself as relatively strong.
Any other form of consciousness acquires the compulsion to mislead itself, to become metaphysical - to become conscious of (itself as) another thing than the physiology that produced it. Nietzsche’s point is moral in so far as it proposes that morality is inevitably linked to consciousness, that consciousness equals morality, as the facet of the WTP that manifests as producing goals and with that the possibility of yes and no - and logic.
I am old and grumpy, to be sure, but I am not washed up. That would imply that I was once something to begin with… and a philosopher without an axe to grind is boring at best and probably not a philosopher at all.
I’m not trying to insult you, I am trying to argue with you. As for me, I feel nothing at all. It’s just an argument.
